2023: The Year in Review

the best, the worst, the hot takes, The Crisis™, and the change to come

Every November, in preparation for writing this recap, I dip into the NFTG archives and sift through twelve months of newsletters. This exercise always reinforces how the pandemic warped my relationship to time: since 2020, every year has lasted a decade and five minutes, somehow both excruciatingly slow and science-fiction fast. "That happened in 2023?," I marveled, reading headlines from this past February. We now permanently live in that 30 Rock meme: "What a week, huh?", "Lemon, it's Wednesday".

In the annals of regional theatre history, 2023 will always be the year of The Crisis™. I don't need to meticulously recount every emergency fundraising campaign, theatre closure, layoff cycle, and season reduction. (Only the most egregious ones.) It's easy to feel discouraged about The State of The Field, but whenever I feel hopeless (which is often, as I'm a catastrophizing depressive), I think about the first line of my favorite Alice Walker poem: "I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart." It's hard not to agonize over an uncertain future — but even if we can't yet imagine how we get there, we can honor the transformation ahead.